Moments earlier, Jean's three-week trial concluded, and he was sentenced to die for beating the teens to death with a baseball bat. The jurors had been dismissed and were not in the courtroom.

"Birthdays, holidays, Mother's Day — I'm at the cemetery, down in the dirt, talking to my daughter," Helen Johnson said, berating Jean for killing her daughter. "You're up here, wasting the taxpayers' money."

Wearing leg shackles, Jean jumped from his seat at the defense table and began shouting at Johnson as she clutched to her chest a framed photo of her daughter.

Jean's outburst spurred at least two men from the victims' family to leap to their feet in the audience and start screaming at Jean.

A half-dozen bailiffs began shouting at everyone to "sit down and shut up," then grabbed Jean.

Jean's mother and oldest brother also stood and yelled at Jean to be quiet.

Two officers in full tactical gear, who were waiting in a back hallway, emerged and grabbed Jean by the arms. They dragged him, still yelling, to a holding cell through a courtroom side door.

More than 120 people in the packed courtroom sat in stunned silence for a moment before state District Judge Belinda Hill pointed to one of the men who had screamed at Jean. She had bailiffs escort him out, not to return.

Cooled down

Jean, who could be heard yelling in the holdover cell for a few minutes, came out calmly after about 10 minutes.

He sat back at the defense table with attorneys Jerald Graber and Terry Gaiser.

"I've never seen anything like it," Graber later said of the outburst.

Prosecutors said Jean had been admonished several times by the judge for acting inappropriately through the trial.

"I'm sort of surprised it doesn't happen more often," said Assistant Harris County District Jane Waters. "You're dealing with criminals."

She noted that the evidence against Jean was "overwhelming."

"He got what he deserved," she said about the jury's decision.

Back at the defense table, Jean lowered his head and stared at the floor as he listened to Helen Johnson and Chelsey Lang's mother, Victoria Wiley.

"You've made your bed; now you have to lie in it," Wiley said as she stood with her teenage son, Naquiel. "Now you've got to pay for what you did."

Stalked ex-girlfriend

The girls' bodies were found after firefighters extinguished a fire Jean set in Wiley's townhouse in April 2010, prosecutors said.

The two, who were inseparable best friends and cousins, were home alone for a sleepover.

Jean, who had stalked Wiley since their 2006 breakup, broke in through an unsecured window in the early morning hours of April 11, 2010. He had been harassing Wiley at a club earlier that night.

Finding the girls home alone, Jean told investigators, he remembered hitting one of the teens and getting a baseball bat but that he did not remember anything else.

"This is your fault, not mine," Wiley said. "You cannot point the finger at me."

Jurors convicted Jean on Monday, then heard a week's worth of evidence before deciding his fate. They found he would be a continuing threat to society and there was no mitigating reason he should not be executed, the two questions jurors must answer to send a defendant to death row.